Slouching toward Zion and More Lies

Next Year in Oberammergau

Next Year in Oberammergau j Winnie Wofford accompanied high school friends to Oklahoma to see the Easter Pageant that began at midnight and ended at dawn, and Winnie was so offended she never went to Oklahoma again. It had gotten bitterly cold in the hours between the baptism of Jesus and his arrest, and Millard Moore offered to share his blanket with her. She accepted because Millard went to the Chillicothe Baptist Church the same as she did. However, crossing the state line had deranged Millard’s mind and he wanted to cross another line right when Judas betrayed Jesus to torch-bearing Roman soldiers who arrested him. Jesus, that is. She arrested Millard, or at least his intention. She told everyone in the car, she told her parents, she told the pastor, she told everyone in school that she had arrested Millard. When they said she didn’t “arrest” him she went to college and returned to Chillicothe as an English teacher to prove that she did “arrest” him. And when Millard ran for the school board, and the city council, and when he was nominated as a deacon in the Baptist Church she told them again. Her only regret was that she didn’t have the police arrest him. After promising her parents she would stay awake all night to watch the Easter Pageant, she had locked herself in the car to avoid Millard and never got to see the best scene of all, Jesus rising into heaven. Everyone agreed it was spectacular but she said she had missed it so that she didn’t have to arrest Millard again. Although it was less than a hundred miles from Chillicothe to the pageant she never went again because Oklahoma had been ruined forever in her memory. Instead, she spent her life teaching school and saving money for an Easter Pageant in Chillicothe. 113 And it was going to be indoors because she didn’t want anyone to be affronted the way she had been affronted by Millard. Winnie had never married because it was a lie that two could live as cheaply as one, especially on one income. If she married she would have to submit to her husband; the same way Millard wanted her to submit, of course, but a husband might also require her to stop teaching or to give her tithe to the church instead of saving it for her dream of a Passion Play in Chillicothe. Her funds multiplied over the years but never as fast as the price of lumber and labor. Although she watched and prayed over her account the way she would if she had a baby that languished , it did not thrive. When retirement loomed on the not too distant horizon she realized she could not achieve her dream without help. She turned to Millard. Millard, who became a deacon because Baptists were more willing to forgive his manly passion than to forgive her for not giving a dime to the church since she had gone to Oklahoma, owned the lumber yard. Millard hadn’t been back to the pageant either. He had avoided Winnie as much as possible in a small town where both went to the same church and both sang in the choir. He ran for the school board so that his children would not have to sit in Winnie’s class. Millard was elected to the school board, his children sat in Winnie’s class, and Winnie told them their father was a bad man but kept the specifics to herself. She had told everyone in Chillicothe that he was a bad man (his wife had left him although that may not have been the only reason) so he had nothing to fear from Winnie Wofford. Still he avoided meeting her eyes in choir practice and spoke only a formal greeting when they met in the street, to which she never responded. Regardless , when Winnie showed up at the lumber yard, Millard was afraid. He invited her into his office, careful to leave the door open. “If you’ve come for another apology, Winnie, I’m sorry. 114 SLOUCHING TOWARD ZION AND MORE LIES And touching your breast was not an accident as I claimed at the time.” “I’ve come for help,” she said. She told him again how she had not seen the spectacular conclusion of the pageant with Jesus rising to...